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10 facts about Aubrey de Grey

Even before he was old enough to start growing a
beard, de Grey was baffled as to why others around him willingly accept ageing
as an unfortunate, yet inevitable, process. He couldn’t understand why no one
was trying to fix it. However, as an adult, his attention was initially
diverted towards computer science, which he studied at university before
landing a job as a software engineer. It was only when he met and married a
biology professor, Adelaide Carpenter, that his interest in ageing was
reawakened.

Inspired by dinner table conversations with his wife,
in 1995, de Grey began to teach himself biology by reading textbooks or
academic journals and attending conferences on the subject of gerontology.
After just two months of observing the subject, he wrote a groundbreaking paper
about the accumulation of mutations in the mitochondria, which challenged the
widely held, yet experimentally unproven, belief that these mutations were to
blame for cellular decay. His paper helped far more experienced gerontological
researchers to realise that the reason why they had been struggling to produce
experimental evidence to support this popular theory is because it was, in
fact, untrue.

3. He hasn’t done any lab work, yet still has a PhD.

In spite of his ‘mad scientist’ appearance, de Grey
doesn’t spend his days tinkering with test tubes in a laboratory. On the
contrary, he has never done any lab work. However, such was the quality of his
well-reasoned theories, that the University of Cambridge chose to award him a PhD
in biology in 2000.

4. Like all great scientists, he has had a ‘Eureka!’
moment.

This occurred in the early hours of the morning in a
hotel room in California in 2000, when he has struggling to sleep due to jet
lag. As he told The Observer, he “suddenly
had the realisation that if you focus on fixing the damage rather than on
pre-empting the damage, you've got a much more feasible approach.” “We are
machines, and ageing is the wearing out of a machine, the accumulation of
damage to a machine, and hence potentially fixable.”

5. He has a ‘Seven Deadly Things’ theory

During his moment of jet-lag-induced inspiration, de
Grey identified seven categories, into which all of the various molecular and
cellular changes in the body that cause damage can be placed, namely:
Junk – Inside Cells
Junk – Outside Cells
Cells – Too Few
Cells – Too Many
Mutations – Chromosomes
Mutations – Mitochondria
Protein Crosslinks
In order to cure all age-related diseases, scientists
will need to figure out how to repair the damage done by each one of these
seven deadly things. This has become the goal of the SENS Research Foundation -
a non-profit organisation, co-founded by de Grey, which was set up in 2009.

6. He’s not aiming for immortality

In an interview in 2013, de Grey expressed his
frustrations about the media’s relentless determination to portray him as ‘the
prophet of immortality’. Headlines such as ‘Immortality’ and ‘Who wants to live
forever?’ are enough to make his beard bristle. He was keen to state: “I don’t work
on longevity. I work on health.” Furthermore, he described the work of the SENS
foundation as ‘the development of rejuvenation biotechnologies’ - medicines for
the future which will slow down and eventually reverse the process of ageing.

7. He’s on a mission to secure more funding for life
extending research

Over the years, de Grey has managed to persuade many
people to donate money to gerontological research. One of the most high profile
investors was the billionaire entrepreneur and PayPal Co-Founder Peter Thiel.
Since the two met in 2004, Thiel has donated a total of $3.5 million to de
Grey's other non-profit organisation - the Methuselah Foundation. Not wishing
to be outdone, when de Grey inherited £11 million from his artist mother when
she died in 2011, he chose to invest the majority of this windfall (£9 million)
in the SENS Foundation’s research.

8. He has an unusual way of warding off criticism

In 2005, the
editor of the MIT Technology Review, Jason Pontin, penned a damning personal
attack on de Grey:
“He dresses like a shabby graduate student and affects
Rip Van Winkle's beard; he has no children; he has few interests outside the
science of biogerontology; he drinks too much beer.”

When asked by outraged readers to provide a reason for
the attack, Pontin claimed that he simply repeating remarks made by respected
biologists, who had not yet dared to criticise de Grey in public.

By way of an apology, Pontin agreed to set up a prize
fund in conjunction with de Grey - offering $20,000 to any molecular biologist
who was able to submit 'an intellectually serious argument about why the work
undertaken by SENS is so wrong and thus unworthy of learned debate'. So far, no
one has been awarded such a prize.

9. He has an answer for everything

De Grey has thought of comebacks to all of the major
objections to the concept of radical life extension. Overpopulation will not
become an issue since people will stop having children or, failing that, there
is always the option of developing colonies on the moon and Mars. He believes
that, if we knew that we were going to live for longer, we would be more
motivated to find solutions to the problem of shortages in food, water and
space. And as far as the morality of healthy life extension is concerned, how
can something which will save hundreds of thousands of lives be deemed
immoral?